Learning Log, Jul 2021
Sketching in Discovery Park overlooking the Puget Sound / Some very orange berries
Another month passed? Really? It feels like July just evaporated in the summer air!
- If I had to pick a word for July, it would be “friendship”. My local friends and I are lucky enough to have had access to COVID vaccines, and now that everyone’s vaccinated and the weather is nice, it feels like we’re making up for lost time by spending more of it together. Two of my friends got married (to each other); there were a couple birthdays; and other hangs at each other’s homes, just because. As someone who is fairly introvert-y, it sometimes feels like going from 0 to 60 in a short period of time. That said, I am so grateful for the opportunity to spend time together (keeping an eye on the Delta variant…), having felt the lack of in-person connection over the prior ~15–16 months.
- Still making progress on a mini-site for seasonal living in the Pacific Northwest. In early July, I crossed off a lot of visual/linting items off the list, added support for dark mode and forced color modes, added social metadata, etc. Later in the month I added content for most of the seasons. Left to do: add content for early and late winter; write an intro the site; add push notification capability (for alerts to upcoming seasons); and do one last pass on fundamentals.
- Attended a couple workshops at the free, virtual Portland Zine Symposium. While it will be nice to participate in IRL communities again, the silver lining is I’ve gotten to participate in events I might not normally have access to. My favorite workshop was “Sketchbooking as an Anti-Capitalist Practice with Mara Ramirez”, which inspired me to have a chill, fun, low-stakes relationship with my sketchbook. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like the recording is up anywhere, but you can find their work here.
- My Japanese practice sort of languished in July; I have a huge backlog of review items in WaniKani that I’m currently chipping away at.
- TIL: if you type
lorem50into an HTML file in VS Code, then press theTABkey, the built-in Emmet extension will generate 50 words of lorem ipsum for you.
